If you go to a landscape supplier, you can get 1 cubic metre for $80 to $90 (1/2 a trailer load) and take pieces of that for camping, or buy a chainsaw and cut your own, Bunnings sell petrol chainsaws for $150, they are more than enough for cutting wood for campfires.

Baz.

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A good cheap fire lighter is used tea bags...just dry them out , put them in a jar with some kero...they burn quite well for some time. Fire wood is getting harder to find with so many people out travelling, we try to carry a couple of bags of smaller type stuff and try to replenish it when in or near wooded areas.

Lin I know its after the fact but an easier more back friendly way to split wood is with a boulster hammer and a couple of wedges. Hold the wedge, hit it with a hammer until its in the wood then hit it home, log opens up and you use the second wedge to finish it.

I had to resurrect this topic as the firewood on our winter camping trip caused us headaches. Most of the week it was just me and a female friend. Neither of use have much experience with making fires, let alone chopping wood.

We managed, but only by using heaps and heaps of twigs and branches. Fortunately there were plenty of those because they had had the mother of all storms there recently.

I took my new axe, but we both tried to split a (bought) block of wood and it was impossible. I'm sure that lots of people will say chopping wood with an axe is all about technique but I'm convinced you need a lot more arm muscle than most women have. Especially me!

I hit that block about 25 times, having to put it on the ground to get leverage to pull the axe out each time, and only managed to split a tiny piece off! Really not worth the effort. So we ended up feeding the fire with lots (and I mean LOTS) of twigs and branches and then put the logs on whole, which did work, but lots of effort also.

My friend bought a saw which we ended up using to chop up a fallen tree that was blocking our ocean view. The trunk turned out to be too green to burn well. But the branches burnt ok.

Anyway, I think I'll go buy one of those wedges and a good hammer and buy some firewood at the servo to practice on! It's quite stressful to not be able to prepare good firewood when it gets dark early and too cold to go without.

Lin wrote:I had one of those with a short handle and couldn't use it... Maybe I could with a long handled one, but I think I like the idea of wedge and hammer better... Worth a try anyway?

Anything which strikes you as practical is worth a try! The only block-splitters I've seen are the long-handled ones like ordinary axes in size. Used to sell them in the Hardware store ... Tomahawk which is now called Hatchet is just a short-handled axe (but now made overseas with an Australian brand name :-(.